If you’ve never played racquetball, you can’t expect to be a champion after your first match. The same holds true for being pregnant. You can’t expect to be immediately good at it. Even if you’ve been pregnant before, you’ve never experienced this pregnancy before. Aspects will be different and you may feel differently. You are not always going to know how you want to address situations that come up. You may not immediately know what will serve you best. And, that makes sense because you’ve never considered some of these pregnancy-related questions before. You will likely not immediately know.
And…there may be times that you act in ways that frustrate you when you look back at them in hindsight. You are going to mess things up because you are doing something you’ve never done before. You’re not going to expect your child to walk without wobbling or failing the first time he tries. Similarly, you’re going to have wobbles and falls and you don’t want to view them as failures. Just like you’re going to nurture your child when she falls and bumps her head as she’s learning to walk, be gentle with yourself.
This is one that sounds so good in theory, then we forget in day-to-day reality.
So, give yourself permission to be less than perfect. We women can put such high expectations on ourselves…especially during pregnancy. It’s this finite period of time, when we’re doing something that really important: physically housing and nurturing our unborn baby. It’s easy to think that we’ve got to pull it together and do it “just right” for these 9 months. We don’t want to fall into that perfection trap. We want to be gentle and understanding with ourselves.
So, even if you’ve been wanting and waiting for this pregnancy for years, it’s okay to be grumpy some days. There are a lot of things to learn during a pregnancy: how to deal with physical changes to your body, how to embrace your new role of mother to this unborn child, how to plan for the care needed for a newborn, how to deal with circumstances that are outside your control, how to create this new life in a way that works for you. There are many considerations and circumstances that you have never encountered before!
Take a moment now and Identify for yourself: How can you be more gentle with yourself? Where do you need to give yourself a break?
